wrong number of arguements (1 for 0) on ActiveRecord::Base#send

rubyonrails-talk
1

So I'm not exactly using Rails, but just ActiveRecord. Though I felt this would be more appropriate in the Rails forum than the general Ruby forum.

I'm working on an app that interacts with databases, without having a database of its own.

I have a class called Modeller, and a Modeller#retrieve_model(name) method that takes a name, looks for a table matching that name, creates a model that inherits from ActiveRecord::Base and returns it. It works great.

So I can enter:

m = Modeller.new(<params for connecting to db>) model = m.retrieve_model('page')

And I get back a model called Page, connected to the database and ready to go.

But a problem occurs when I try to call methods on it with BasicObject#send.

I take a list of fields from a yaml file (user supplied) then attempt to update the fields with BasicObject#send.

yaml file example -   content: some content   parent_id: 1   children_count: 0 etc.

So my code ends up like this:

model.send('content', 'some content')

And it blows up with an error:

ArgumentError: wrong number of arguments (1 for 0)     /home/zatz/.rbenv/versions/2.0.0-p247/lib/ruby/gems/2.0.0/gems/activerecord-4.0.1 /lib/active_record/attribute_methods/read.rb:58:in `__temp__37964756f59646'     /home/zatz/.rbenv/versions/2.0.0-p247/lib/ruby/gems/2.0.0/gems/activerecord-4.0.1 /lib/active_record/attribute_methods.rb:150:in `method_missing'

And I'm stumped. What's going on?

A very big thank you ahead of time to whoever can help me figure this out. I'm totally open to an alternative way of doing this too.

2

Alright, I had a big brain fart with this one. I was confusing the syntax with define_method.

It doesn't work because it's calling model.content('some content').

What I need is model.content = 'some content'.

So the correct invocation would be model.send('content=', 'some content').

Sorry for that, total not-thinking on my part.